Reducing Primary Cesareans

Introduction

In spring 2015, the American College of Nurse-Midwives (ACNM) launched the Healthy Birth Initiative: Reducing Primary Cesareans Project.

This initiative, funded by the Transforming Birth Fund, offers the opportunity for maternity care professionals and health systems to make system changes aimed at reducing the incidence of Primary Cesarean Births in the United States, which have reached alarming rates without associated improvements in health outcomes for mothers and babies.

Reducing Primary Cesareans Learning Collaborative: ACNM has an ongoing multi-hospital learning collaborative aimed at reducing primary cesarean births in low risk women through the support of physiologic labor and birth. The first learning collaborative began in 2016 with support from the Transforming Birth Fund. Between 2016 and the present, 25 multi-disciplinary hospital teams from across the country have engaged in implementing one of three models aimed at reducing NTSV cesareans. The models are aimed at supporting progress in labor, increasing comfort in labor, or encouraging the use of Intermittent Ausculation (IA). Hospitals are supported by a customized data center, a web-based registry where participants in this collaborative upload data each month on the key metrics for their bundles, and are able to see how their results trend over time in terms of reducing cesareans. Many of the hospitals who started in 2016 are continuing to work together in 2017 and 2018, and a group of new hospitals join each year. More information about the teams that have participated is available at the link below.

A key aim of the RPC Learning Collaborative is to build midwifery leadership of quality improvement teams within health systems.